To help make my first post a bit more clear, I'll include the site's web page. It talks about hard-soft techniques, allowing the newbies to acclimate to martial arts with harder techniques, and then as they become more experienced, introduce soft techniques. The sensei says that he has 45 years of martial arts experience, and the martial art is from '67 in Viet-nam or something like that.

I know that I should look for aliveness in training, and good sparring practices. There seems to be a lot of board breaking in their photos, but that's just because they make for good pictures, I'm guessing.

The founder of the system lived in Gainesville, Florida, where I attended university. I had several friends who trained with him. The ones who were frustrated with the lack of contact sparring ended up coming over to a friend's kungfu school for open sparring sessions. None of them could fight, including the black belts.

The founder of the system lived in Gainesville, Florida, where I attended university. I had several friends who trained with him. The ones who were frustrated with the lack of contact sparring ended up coming over to a friend's kungfu school for open sparring sessions. None of them could fight, including the black belts.

I did Coung Nhu from '94-'98.
As a beginner you start off with the basic pinan kata from shotkan, basic throws/sweeps from judo, and ukemi. Later it progresses into stuff from aikido and _ing _chun. And then some basic bo/tanbo work.

Who your instructor is will depend on where your lessons will lean. I had a couple of instructors, one was a hard core shotokan guy who did some kickboxing, so when he taught it was all shotokan. The other two were judo and jiujitsu players, so when they taught it was all throws and newaza.

They offered this at FAMU and FSU when I was when I was there. I took it for a semester, then my parents got pissed that I was wasting tuition money on a MA class. They had a point for what I paid to take this class at the University I could have done a lot more in other schools.* I thought of it as a Shotokan knockoff because of the kata we had to do . Wasn't great but wasn't horrid.

*To clarify at FSU it was a free club at FAMU it was an credited PE class listed as KARATE/TEAKWONDO.

HOLY SHEIT ASIA! I didn't know you went to FAMU and FSU. (I did it as a free thing for FSU, this was many years ago. I used to help run the Intermural Judo club there in the combatatives room. (I live in Tally) I did the Coung Nhu for a little bit there too as sort of a means of getting to know more people. It was probably about 8 to 10 years ago, somewhere around there. Somewhere in the 98 to 2000 time frame.

I agree with you, it wasn't all bad. There was some applicable stuff, some total crap.

They had a big, long time school in Berkeley Ca. The Grand master, from what I heard, actually lost interest in Martial Arts and got into doing marathons and iron mans. Then he died. Lot's of butch lesbians in the local photo's but it's Berkeley, so, you know the drill...